Human Flower Project
Orrington, MAINE USA
Murrieta, CALIFORNIA USA
Princeton, MAINE USA
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Trespassing for Power Fungus
In the disputed highlands along the border between China and India, a strange medicinal plant provides military cover.
Cordyceps sinensis, a fungus from the Himalayas,
inhabits and grows from the bodies of insects (here a
caterpillar)—and that’s just the beginning.
Photo: Heathen Healing
It’s referred to as the “Chinese love flower” but we don’t think that’s a very nice thing to say about the Chinese, or love—or flowers either. Just look at it.
This is a fungus, Cordyceps sinensis—an entomopathogenic fungus, meaning it grows on and, in time, into and out of insects. That’s hard on insects—lethal, as a matter of fact—as well as enormously weird and disgusting (just our opinion).
You might call its growth habit an “incursion.” But it’s human incursion into the fugus’s habitat, the very high territory along the China/India border, that prompted the Telegraph’s recent story about this plant.
Indian officials are claiming that small groups of Chinese troops, forces with the People’s Liberation Army, have been coming across “the disputed MacMahon Line” that separates the two countries. Dean Nelson writes that crossing the line “remains highly sensitive for both countries which fought a border war in 1962 in which China captured but later returned Tawang district, which it claims is part of Tibet” – also considered disputed territory. This moist, mountainous environment, between 10,000-12,000 feet in altitude, is where Cordyseps sinensis grows.